The Linux Mint Bloghttp://blog.linuxmint.com
News from the Mint TeamMon, 30 Mar 2015 11:35:29 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Monthly News – March 2015http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2790
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2790#commentsMon, 30 Mar 2015 11:29:44 +0000http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2790The release candidate for LMDE 2 “Betsy” was announced. Bugs were fixed and we’re now getting ready for a stable release. Working on Betsy was very exciting and it paved the way for some of the work planned for Linux Mint 18 (in 2016). It also highlighted a few areas where things could be improved further, so some of Betsy’s improvements will also find their way into Linux Mint 17.2. I’d like to thank all the people who helped us test Betsy and who sent us their feedback.

The team also worked on MDM (the display manager which is responsible for your login screen) and redesigned the way it detects sessions. Technical details were posted on http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2015/03/better-session-detection-in-mdm-2-0. The upcoming version 2.0 of MDM should also bring better support for encrypted home directories, in particular where it comes to language, session and avatar detection.

Bugs were fixed also in mintstick (the USB formatting tool and ISO image writer) and in Cinnamon 2.4 (drag’n drop freezing issues, black bars in the screensaver, many small bug fixes). We want to test these a little more first and possibly put them in “Romeo” before we serve them to you as updates in Rebecca and Betsy.

A huge amount of work went into making Cinnamon load faster. Sadly, we’re only half-way there and the results aren’t conclusive yet. On one of our test machines Cinnamon is able to load in less than a second in normal conditions, but can take up to 12 seconds to load the very fist time the computer is turned on. Investigations showed that this delay took place in cinnamon-menus and cinnamon-desktop, during the initial loading of application info (from /etc/xdg/menus, /usr/share/applications) and icon themes. Through optimization, the loading time was reduced from 12 seconds to 7 seconds average… which is a first step but doesn’t yet solve anything (“slow” and “slower” both feel “slow”). We’re still working on this and hoping we’ll be able to drastically reduce that initial loading time.

Linux Mint has a brilliant development team, but we need more artists, more photographs and more Web developers:

Web interfaces: Many components in Linux Mint use Web technologies (the login screen, the welcome screen and the software manager use HTML, Cinnamon and GTK3 are styled in CSS…)

Backgrounds: Each new release brings a new set of gorgeous photographs and backgrounds. We always need help on this.

Widgets and icons: Our themes and icon themes are great but we’ve been using them since Linux Mint 10. We need to work on something new, maybe adapt to new trends in UI design, successfully marry our identity with flatter looks without falling into something that might be too minimalistic… there’s a lot of work on that and we’d like to get started.

Websites: Some of them look old, some of them look bad even. We’d like to redesign all of them, make them look simpler, more in line with the current trends and more consistent with each others. If we can’t find the talent internally we’ll contract this work to an external company.

Producing themes, backgrounds, icons is something we can do or get done at least. When there’s a particular need or shortage of artwork, we’re able to outsource and either acquire or find material we can use. Long term though, we’d like to work with people, internally, and have them empowered to change and improve our visual identity, not only online, but within the operating system as well. If you know how to make things “look good”, if you’re talented with HTML, graphic design or even just your camera, don’t hesitate to come and talk to us on IRC at #linuxmint-dev (irc.spotchat.org).

Last but not least, we just got word from CompuLab that the first MintBox mini were produced… and we’re welcoming a champion of online privacy as our new Platinum sponsor. While we’re waiting to publish pictures of the new unit and details about this sponsorship I’d like to thank CompuLab and PIA, it’s a real pleasure to be working with them.

As always many thanks to our sponsors and to everybody who contributes to our project, via donations, feedback or even simply time spent on making Linux Mint better. Congratulations and thanks to all people involved.

LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is a very exciting distribution, targeted at experienced users, which provides the same environment as Linux Mint but uses Debian as its package base, instead of Ubuntu.

LMDE is less mainstream than Linux Mint, it has a much smaller user base, it is not compatible with PPAs, and it lacks a few features. That makes it a bit harder to use and harder to find help for, so it is not recommended for novice users.

LMDE is however slightly faster than Linux Mint and it runs newer packages. Life on the LMDE side can be exciting. There are no point releases in LMDE 2, except for bug fixes and security fixes base packages stay the same, but Mint and desktop components are updated continuously. When ready, newly developed features get directly into LMDE 2, whereas they are staged for inclusion on the next upcoming Linux Mint 17.x point release. Consequently, Linux Mint users only run new features when a new point release comes out and they opt-in to upgrade to it. LMDE 2 users don’t have that choice, but they also don’t have to wait for new packages to mature and they usually get to run them first. It’s more risky, but more exciting.

Important info:

Login and password for the live session

Gtk theme and icons failing to load

Multi-core and multi-CPU support in 32-bit kernel

Modprobe errors, warning messages during the boot sequence

Yumi multiboot

Make sure to read the “Release Notes” to be aware of important info or known issues related to this release.

The team is proud to announce the release of LMDE 2 “Betsy” Cinnamon RC.

LMDE 2 “Betsy” Cinnamon Edition

LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is a very exciting distribution, targeted at experienced users, which provides the same environment as Linux Mint but uses Debian as its package base, instead of Ubuntu.

LMDE is less mainstream than Linux Mint, it has a much smaller user base, it is not compatible with PPAs, and it lacks a few features. That makes it a bit harder to use and harder to find help for, so it is not recommended for novice users.

LMDE is however slightly faster than Linux Mint and it runs newer packages. Life on the LMDE side can be exciting. There are no point releases in LMDE 2, except for bug fixes and security fixes base packages stay the same, but Mint and desktop components are updated continuously. When ready, newly developed features get directly into LMDE 2, whereas they are staged for inclusion on the next upcoming Linux Mint 17.x point release. Consequently, Linux Mint users only run new features when a new point release comes out and they opt-in to upgrade to it. LMDE 2 users don’t have that choice, but they also don’t have to wait for new packages to mature and they usually get to run them first. It’s more risky, but more exciting.

Important info:

Login and password for the live session

Gtk theme and icons failing to load

Multi-core and multi-CPU support in 32-bit kernel

Modprobe errors, warning messages during the boot sequence

Yumi multiboot

Make sure to read the “Release Notes” to be aware of important info or known issues related to this release.

We look forward to receiving your feedback. Thank you for using Linux Mint and have a lot of fun testing the release candidate!

]]>http://blog.linuxmint.com/?feed=rss2&p=278199Monthly News – February 2015http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2771
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2771#commentsMon, 23 Feb 2015 13:06:51 +0000http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2771Spring is coming and so is “Betsy”. QA testing for the new version of LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is starting today. If you want to follow our progress on this please visit http://community.linuxmint.com/iso and https://github.com/linuxmint/Roadmap.

Thanks to our partner eUKhost we’re doubling the capacity and performance of one of our main servers. Many Linux Mint services are involved but we’ll migrate them one by one and we don’t expect any downtime. Note that the package repositories are not affected by this upgrade.

A preview of some of the new features developed for Cinnamon was published on Segfault. Among other things, Cinnamon 2.6 will introduce search providers and support for multiple panels.

Multiple panels in Cinnamon 2.6

Multiple panels give users more flexibility and they will be useful for users with more than one monitor.

Search providers will be a core part of Cinnamon. Applets, desklets and the Cinnamon desktop itself will be able to query them to retrieve search results. This will allow us but also applet developers to make it easy for you to search for a variety of things (a movie on IMDB, one of your emails, a Firefox bookmark, a page you recently visited, or one of your files on the hard drive…etc).

Example of an applet using search providers in Cinnamon 2.6

Last month we received donations from 380 people. Together they raised a total of $9,036. Many thanks to all of you who contribute to our project, to the people who donated and to our sponsors and partners. Many thanks also to the many people who help other users in the forums and chat rooms, and special thanks this month to two of our developers: dalcde and glebihan, whose exciting work on Cinnamon 2.6 was featured above.

]]>http://blog.linuxmint.com/?feed=rss2&p=277139Monthly News – January 2015http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2764
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2764#commentsFri, 16 Jan 2015 11:48:26 +0000http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2764We wish you all a very Happy New Year 2015. This year is only just started and unfortunately terrible things happened already. Our job isn’t to comment World news though but to focus on what we have all in common, a very constructive and positive passion for computing and for Linux in particular. I hope we’ll continue to make people happy this year and by doing so I’m sure we’ll have a lot of fun and happiness as well.

To start the new year we shared exciting news about the new MintBox Mini. I’d like to thank our friends at CompuLab, it’s always a pleasure to be working with them.

The latest MintBox, smaller than ever

In November last year, probably as a consequence of the Linux Mint 17.1 release, the traffic doubled on our repositories and intensified in December to a point where our server could no longer serve enough concurrent connections. During a week or so this resulted in very slow response times, download speeds or even in timeouts and errors in various APT applications (apt-get, the Software Manager, the Update Manager, Synaptic etc..). We would like to apologize for this. Although it’s good news to see more people use Linux Mint, issues which affect everybody like this are our worst nightmare. A cluster was put in place and two servers now handle requests for the main repositories. We’re happy to report that they’ve been running smoothly for a few weeks now. Traffic also increased on other servers and the next thing to break was this very blog. You might have seen the temporary announcement while it was being moved to a faster server (or an error page while it was down). Altogether we have close to 10 dedicated servers in various places all around the World but some of them were acquired at a time when our audience was just a 10th of its size. We need to continue to scale and get to a position where traffic can double again without breaking anything. It’s an easy yet important task.

LMDE 2 “Betsy” received a lot of updates this week and its “Mint” packages are now almost on par with Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca. The next step is to adapt the Debian Jessie base and port all the changes and fixes already applied for Linux Mint 17.x on top of Trusty. This should take a week or two and we might be in a position to open up a BETA some time in February and to start welcoming feedback from people interested in helping us test this new distribution. Similar to Linux Mint 17.x, LMDE 2 “Betsy” will be using the traditional sysvinit. The move to systemd could happen with Linux Mint 18 and LMDE 3, giving this new technology and the Linux ecosystem 2 years (or more) to mature and to iron out integration and compatibility issues. Cinnamon in particular is built without systemd support by default and the development team is planning to change this in version 2.6 to give the DE the ability to switch at runtime between systemd and consolekit/upower without the need to recompile anything.

Pre-ALPHA “Betsy” running Cinnamon 2.4, sysvinit and GTK 3.14

January is an exciting month for us. Everything we implemented has been delivered and a new development cycle is starting. After a quick maintenance release on selected projects (muffin, cinnamon, cinnamon-desktop, nemo) we’re ready to switch our Cinnamon labels to 2.5.x, to merge pull requests, to talk about big ideas and to decide what we want to achieve in the next 6 months. Many great ideas are yet to be implemented, thanks to your feedback we’ve a huge backlog of items we want to focus on. Developers are free to choose what they want to work on but also conscious of the needs of our distribution and what is most important to you. Personally I want to continue to improve the system layer and the Mint tools as these benefit all editions, but I’m also planning on improving performance and snappiness in Cinnamon. Sticking to LTS boosted our development and it showed us how quick we were at developing new features. The adoption of tools such as Github made it really easy for new developers to join us and for people outside the team to contribute new designs and new implementations. I can’t wait to tackle some of the items on our Roadmap and it’s very exciting not to be able to predict what great improvements will land in 17.2, where they will come from, who will implement them and what aspects of the operating system they’ll improve.

Last month we received $14,000 in donations. 509 people donated to us. The amount of support we’re getting from you has always been exceptional, but what happened in December was unprecedented. We’ve never received so much and from so many different people before. I don’t know what to say only that I’m delighted to see so many people happy with what we’re doing and wanting us to continue. I already feel privileged to be able to work on something I love and to feel that community around me. I really enjoy working with the Mint developers as well and I’m excited because after we worked together for 6 months, like me they were able to enjoy seeing it all released in 17.1, like me they were able to read your feedback and your reactions and now they’ll get what is somewhat like a Christmas bonus after a fantastic year, as their budget includes a portion of the donations. It’s great to be able to share and create with great people, and it’s all thanks to you who support us, who promote us, who support each others, who feed us with ideas and information on how to make it better and better. So this is a big thank you to all of you and here’s to another great year. Let’s see what we can do

The MintBox Mini is powered by an AMD A4 6400T and a Radeon R3 GPU and equipped with 4GB RAM and 64GB SSD. In terms of performance, it is twice as powerful as the 2012 “MintBox Pro”.

CompuLab is planning to ship it at $295 with a percentage of the sales going towards Linux Mint and a 5 years warranty. The MintBox Mini will also be available via Amazon US and Amazon Europe (where it should ship at €295 custom/vat/delivery included).

Stay tuned. We’ll have more details on the specifications and benchmark comparisons as we get closer to the second quarter of 2015.

]]>http://blog.linuxmint.com/?feed=rss2&p=276087Upgrade path from 17 to 17.1 now open for all editionshttp://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2757
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2757#commentsSun, 11 Jan 2015 10:51:42 +0000http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2757The upgrade path from Linux Mint 17 to Linux Mint 17.1 is now open for all editions (Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce).

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” Xfce.

Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca Xfce Edition

Linux Mint 17.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

If you want to upgrade from Linux Mint 17.1 RC, simply launch the Update Manager and install any Level 1 update available.

If you want to upgrade from Linux Mint 17, please wait for a few days while we release a new version of the Update Manager to you. In the meantime, you do not need to download or to reinstall anything. We’ll make announcements when this is ready.

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” KDE.

Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca KDE Edition

Linux Mint 17.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

If you want to upgrade from Linux Mint 17.1 RC, simply launch the Update Manager and install any Level 1 update available.

If you want to upgrade from Linux Mint 17, please wait for a few days while we release a new version of the Update Manager to you. In the meantime, you do not need to download or to reinstall anything. We’ll make announcements when this is ready.

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” KDE RC.

Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca KDE Edition

Linux Mint 17.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.